The Books

Middlemarch

by George EliotReviewed 04/09/2012

Watch video

Overview

In the English village of Middlemarch in the early 1830s, Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist, busying herself with schemes to help the local poor. She shocks her family by marrying the middle-aged scholar Edward Causaubon and soon realises she has made a grave mistake and her feelings for him descend into pity.

Meanwhile, young doctor Tertius Lydgate, another idealist, arrives in Middlemarch intent on medical reform and discovery. Like Dorothea, his marriage to the town beauty and mayor’s daughter, Rosamond quickly descends into unhappiness.

Rosamond’s restless and irresponsible brother Fred is in love with his childhood sweetheart and in attempting to win her affections he is shocked into a reassessment of his life and actions.

These key stories are skilfully interwoven alongside various side plots and serve to paint a vast and detailed portrait not only of a town but of humanity in general, with all its strengths and weaknesses. Middlemarch gives us a razor sharp, yet compassionate insight into how individuals deal with the changes and struggles of everyday life.

“There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving her contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in the twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honoured, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims.

She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.”

JENNIFER BYRNE: Our next book now, and it's Margaret's pick, is widely considered one of the best novels ever written in English. It's about small lives on a large stage. It is George Eliot's Middlemarch.

VOICEOVER: The provincial town of Middlemarch plays host to a series of compromised romantic couplings. Dorothea Brooke seeks love and intellectual fulfilment, which lures her into a disastrous marriage with the pedantic elderly scholar, Casaubon. Young medical reformer Tertius Lydgate falls in love with the spendthrift Rosamond, while Rosamond's restless and irresponsible brother, Fred, is in love with his childhood sweetheart and attempts to win her affections. Within these interweaving lives, all the folly, self-delusion and compromises of human life play out.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Well, Margaret, this is your true love. Tell us why.

MARGARET WERTHEIM: I think Middlemarch is the greatest book that's ever been written - greatest novel ever written in English. And I think there are many things that are great about it, but what's really powerful to me is that it's about people - ordinary people - who set out with enormously good ambitions to transform the world for the better, and they fail. Not because they're impeded by the great forces of history, just they're unable to do it in the context of their own lives. To me, Middlemarch is an epic story set on a domestic scale. It is about the great ideas of people wanting to transform society, but it plays out at the level of a little country village.

DAVID VANN: I loved it too, I'm happy to say! I really thoroughly enjoyed the two weeks that I spent with the book.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Is that a reference to the 850 pages?

DAVID VANN: At first, I have to admit, I felt fear. But it's worth every moment spent. I mean, it really is a fantastic journey through the book, because she's so sharp in her observations of human character and motivations that I constantly found myself, every couple of pages, reflecting on my own character! Coming up a little short! Reflecting on my family and friends. It's a book to make you re-evaluate your whole life and who you are and what you do. I mean, that, I think, is a fantastic thing and speaks to what you said about the humanity of the book.

MARGARET WERTHEIM: And every sentence is beautiful.

DAVID VANN: Yeah, it really is!

JENNIFER BYRNE: Every sentence, and there are many to choose. What did you think, Marieke?

MARIEKE HARDY: It was too long! It was too long! It was prohibitive... I apologise in advance. It was prohibitively long. I began to resent it for how much time it took up to read. I thought it was repetitive. I thought it simpered in a lot of parts. If it was half its size, it would be a masterpiece. The moments that I loved it, I truly loved it. But I ended up really resenting watching George Eliot flex her intellect like a gymnast over the pages. There's a bio at the start which said she was engaged to a man who dumped her because she was morbidly intellectual, and I thought, 'I can see where he's coming from'. But I found it was just... It dragged on and on and the repetition really bothered me. There were scenes where I thought that point was made 150 pages ago and didn't need to be made again. I thought it was Days Of Our Lives in bonnets. Well, she's not gonna come and find me! I'm fine! Whatever!

JENNIFER BYRNE: I would like to actually... This is an unusual show. I am with Marieke on this, absolutely.

MARIEKE HARDY: Yes!

JENNIFER BYRNE: I mean, when George Eliot can write so succinctly. Like, Casaubon, Dorothea's first husband, for instance, had a smile like pale, wintery sunshine. Simple. Why then does she need to go on for ENDLESS pages describing someone's character? She's so sharp, so talented, so good, doesn't she sometimes need to edit herself? Does it need to be this long?

MARGARET WERTHEIM: I guess, for me, I would've been happy if Middlemarch was 1,000 pages. To me, it's like eating extremely fine chocolate. It's just so rich and so beautiful that every mouthful is a joy.

MARIEKE HARDY: Too much chocolate makes you sick, though. There are too many characters. This is the thing as well. I felt like I needed one of those... I felt like I needed one of those going-to-war boards where I could push them all around. 'So he's not having sex with her and he's having sex...'

JENNIFER BYRNE: No-one's having sex!

MARIEKE HARDY: Three-quarters through, someone says, 'You're on my land!' I'm like, 'Who the hell are you?' You're new and I don't have space for new.

JASON STEGER: I think the great presence is George Eliot, though. I mean, you sort of hear her intelligence or you read her intelligence.

MARIEKE HARDY: But I resented it sometimes. I think she was showing off. I did! I found it... OK, alright. I've gotta read...

JASON STEGER: Hang on. The other interesting thing, given that we've been talking about historical novels, this is a historical novel. When she wrote it, she set it 30 or 40 years earlier? And it's around the time... It's set in the early 1830s when they're debating... There's a Reform Bill coming through. But it is a historical novel.

MARIEKE HARDY: Binet was able to put a lot of history in a much shorter space.

JASON STEGER: But you also get, in the same way of Binet, you get George Eliot coming in and saying, 'You don't wanna hear so much about Dorothea here. We need to go onto this person and that, and...'

JENNIFER BYRNE: Let's talk about that voice.

JASON STEGER: I really like that wit.

JENNIFER BYRNE: That, I assume, is what you meant when you called it a 'modern novel'. In fact, Zadie Smith has written about Middlemarch and said that all 21st novelists owe an enormous amount to George Eliot, because she cleared the thicket, she freed the form.

DAVID VANN: I would so disagree with that statement about the actual language. It's not a 20th century novel in any kind of way. In fact, the 300 creative writing programs in the US for the last 40 years have been teaching students to not write Middlemarch. Because everything in the language is abstract and cerebral. We're told everything, shown almost nothing. There's almost no concrete physical descriptions. So we get Casaubon's face, Rosamond's face, we have a little bit of clothing, we have Dorothea's room, occasionally the trees or something else in the yard, but for 850 pages, it's shocking how little concrete physical detail there is. And she's not alone - Henry James shares that quality. It's the very opposite of Blood Meridian that I brought onto the show, which is all content, physical description, no telling us about the characters, no access to thoughts and feelings. What interested me about this is that I loved it. Everything I teach my students not to do, it's not what I usually read, it's not what I do in my writing, but I think it has its own pleasure, which is that I felt that it wasn't too long and repetitive and that in every paragraph, she does have some fine observation of human character and motivations. And that that's the pay-off, a different kind of pay-off.

JENNIFER BYRNE: You're saying it lives in the heads of the characters.

DAVID VANN: But in the voice and style, this is not something that would be useful for a writer now.

MARGARET WERTHEIM: To me, to be immersed in the interiority of such well-drawn characters, I actually really like the fact that there is no physical description. I think we've become obsessed with physical description. Describing every piece of clothing - it's like a fashion show. What is amazing to me about both Henry James and George Eliot is their ability to inhabit the minds of so many different characters and bring every one of them to life as a mental force.

JENNIFER BYRNE: To me, the question of the length is 'Are the stakes high enough?' and that's the question I had. Not that it's boring - it's not. The characters are great. The writing is exquisite at times and it's polished constantly. I just kept wondering, 'What are the stakes here?'

MARGARET WERTHEIM: I think that's part of the point is that what's at stake here is just simply the human heart. In that sense, I'd like to comment about the difference between this and HHhH, because HHhH is about the most epic level of human history. This is about people in a little village. But 99% of people in the world inhabit little villages. Very few people get to act on a world stage. And I think, in one way, this is a braver novel, because it is about saying, 'How can we describe the mundane everyday lives of ordinary people, rather than... It's easy to describe heroism, in one way, because the stakes are so high. It's much more difficult to elevate the little inhabitants of Middlemarch and make their lives important. Which they are, because all lives are important.

JENNIFER BYRNE: George Eliot's Middlemarch. And that is our club for another month.

Mary Ann Evans (alternatively Mary Anne and Marian) better known by her pen name George Eliot, was born on the 22nd of November 1819 in a small farmhouse in Warwickshire. Her father, Robert Evans rose from his profession as a carpenter to become a prominent land agent. Her mother, Christiana, was Robert’s second wife. Mary Ann was the second of five children to the couple, and one of the three that survived.

Mary Ann was an exceptionally bright child and a voracious reader. She was sent to boarding school at age five and found solace from loneliness and isolation through books. Even at this young age she was considered an “ugly duckling” and because of her lack of physical beauty, her father invested in a thorough education for his daughter, something quite unusual for the time. She went to a series of schools and was heavily influenced by various evangelical teachers and clergymen. Her mother died when Mary Ann was 17. She promptly returned home to become the household manager and look after her father. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry. Here she met Charles Bray and his brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, both of whom were radical thinkers and liberal campaigners who enthusiastically introduced Evans to their progressive way of thinking. In 1842, Evans came to the view that Christianity was based on ‘mingled truth and fiction’ and told her father that she could no longer go to church, a huge step for the once extremely pious and evangelical girl. Her father was devastated and threatened to throw her out. Instead they came up with a compromise, Evans could think what she liked if she attended church respectfully with her father. In 1846, Evans completed her first major literary work, translating into English, The Life of Jesus by D.F. Strauss. She cared for her father until his death in 1849 when she was 30 years old. After her Robert’s death, Mary Ann travelled to Switzerland with the Brays and then decided to stay on in Geneva on her own. She lived with the family of artist, Francois d’Albert DuradeOn returning to London in 1850 she changed her name to Marian Evans and decided to pursue a career as a journalist. She stayed with John Chapman, the radical publisher of the left-wing journal The Westminister Review. She became assistant editor of the paper in 1851 and did most of the work in running it, contributing many reviews and essays. In 1851, Evans met critic and philosopher, George Henry Lewes and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was separated from his wife but was unable to get a divorce. Mary Ann made the bold and life changing decision to travel with Lewes alone to Germany. The couple returned to England referring to themselves as a married couple, with Mary Ann even calling herself Marian Evans Lewes. This was extremely scandalous behaviour at the time and Mary Ann found herself ostracised from “proper” society and her family. Lewes recognised Mary Ann’s talent and encouraged her to take up fiction writing. Concealing her identity and publishing under the name George Eliot, soon she was a literary sensation. She continued to write popular, well received and best-selling novels for the next fifteen years. She was widely acclaimed as one of, if not the greatest Victorian writers during her lifetime.Her loyal partner Lewes passed away in 1878. Two years later on the 16th May 1880, Mary Ann found herself in the centre of another scandal, when at 61 she suddenly married Scottish commission agent John Walter Cross, who was twenty years her junior. After their honeymoon in Italy, Mary Ann fell ill with a throat infection, this coupled with long term kidney disease led to her death that December. She was buried next to Lewes in Highgate Cemetery.